The present invention relates generally to a document editing apparatus operating on an operating system capable of handling a multiplicity of tasks at once, such as UNIX, and more particularly to a document editing apparatus suited profitably for handling and editing such document contents as complicated mathematical expressions and patternized texts.
In the hitherto known document editing apparatuses, editing of a document containing various types of mixed descriptive elements, such as texts, charts, graphics and other data, is performed individually and separately for each of the types of the various descriptive elements, as is described in JP-A-62-72059.
However, in the prior art document editing apparatus, no consideration has been given to the possibility of document generation and editing processing in which a single desired document is generated and edited by using other specific programs (referred to as application programs) additionally or concurrently in the course of execution of a relevant document editing program. In other words, neither attempts nor approaches have been made to the connection of the application programs to the document editing program in the document editing systems known heretofore. Under the circumstances, all of the document data has to be manually inputted and edited by an operator, which means that an operator is forced to perform, for example, calculations contained in a document to be created in accordance with relevant mathematical expressions manually or with the aid of another program and input the results of the calculations again into the document editing processing, involving a complication in the operating procedure.
Further, it is observed that in the case of editing of a type of document which has a predetermined format, it is often required to input the same data as a copy of the same master document a number of times, presenting an obstacle in realizing the document creation or editing in a straightforward manner, to the inconvenience of the operator.